Junto Ohki

Project Goal

“It’s not that deaf people are less skilled. Society makes them disabled because society is only for hearing people. I want to change that.”

The world’s 70 million deaf people may one day converse together freely, thanks to the vision of a young Japanese researcher and entrepreneur. Though not deaf himself, Junto Ohki was entranced by sign language as a student and became a qualified interpreter. Realizing the world’s deaf were divided by 126 different sign languages and that these lacked a dictionary to translate between them, he has started to build one, using crowdsourcing to obtain signs worldwide and a special keyboard to input them. Called SLinto, the dictionary will soon hold 10,000 signs, enabling sign languages to evolve richer vocabularies and deaf people to access social and business services more easily. It is being tested in Japan, the United States and India.